Dear pro-lifers of ETSU,
Outrage erupted a few weeks ago when thousands of aborted baby parts were found at a deceased abortion doctor’s house in Illinois. Though we are rightfully angered, this situation reveals some of the inconsistencies plaguing the prevailing pro-life ideology that we actually borrowed from the other side.
While America discharges its ire at Ulrich Klopfer’s possession of fetal remains, it seems to forget that these babies were aborted within haven of the womb in the first place. Our culture has been so immunized to the evil of abortion that it can gloss over the fact that these young children were aborted and still rage against Klopfer hoarding fetal remains.
Like the culture, most of current pro-life ideology has been inoculated with the acceptance of abortion. Abortion does not faze us like it should; we are satisfied with far too few results on our part. The legislative victories we celebrate include widened abortion clinic hallways, trigger bills that will never take effect, some reductions on gestational age for abortion that would keep abortions legal if Roe v. Wade were overturned and only 862,320 babies murdered the last year for which we have data (2017). We don’t want to abolish institutionalized abortion as much as we want to merely regulate it. Our bar has fallen so low.
What is the root of our failure? We have lost the moral and religious grounds of our cause. Instead of campaigning for life on the basis of its God-given moral sanctity and the cosmic crime of taking it, we have resorted to defending the best overall health of the mother or perhaps to declaring that life begins at conception, only to abandon logic to say it isn’t murder to take that life. Our cause needs to be grounded in objective morality for us to take a firm stance and be effective in condemning abortion. Abortion is a moral evil because God has decreed murder to be evil. When we lose this, we don’t give lawmakers anything to legislate against, resulting in the piece-meal regulations we’ve enacted for decades. God said, “You shall not murder.” That is the real reason to decry abortion, and that is the only reason we need.
When we ground our thinking that way, our rhetoric will become more accurate and more effective. Most pro-lifers do not call abortion “murder.” By speaking this way, we are adopting pro-choice rhetoric. That is how they speak as they water down the issue, and using the same language suggests we have acquiesced to their worldview.
If abortion is not the murder of a life, we have lost our solid ground for condemning it and resort to anything we can pull out of thin air. When we grant the pro-choice philosophy its weakened verbiage about what an abortion is, we have essentially crowned it the victor in the debate. Now that our language has flopped on the facts of the issue for so long, we have seen how fruitless our efforts have been as 3,000-plus babies are killed every day. We need to stop using word magic and be truthful enough to call abortion “murder,” not just an operation. Truthful and shocking language needs to be used to awaken people from the inoculating amnesia and indifference they are walking in. But where we stand on religious grounds to see abortion as murder, we can also relish in the hope the Gospel offers to mend the distressed and broken lives of those who have participated in an abortion.
The natural consequence of grounding our cause in objective religion is that our tolerance for abortion indeed disappears and that our bar is raised to its rightful place. We stop celebrating the relatively low percentages of women who abort each year and instead grieve the 9/11 that occurs every day. Our voices become more distinguished, and the country wakes up to what abortion really is. We are motivated to real action – the kind of action exemplified by ministries like End Abortion Now, which has saved countless babies by standing on the grounds of the Bible to declare the truth about abortion. As a unified body fixed on firm principles, we can and will see change in our country as the tables of abortion begin to turn.
